Limerick Artist John Shinnors is highly collectable - but while his work is instantly recognisable, it has never been static, writes Aidan Dunne
Limerick painter John Shinnors is one of the most popular artists in the country. With his predilection for bold black-and-white patterning, a familiar range of subject matter, and the mysterious radiance that seems to permeate his images, his work is instantly recognisable. It is also widely admired and keenly sought after by a growing number of collectors, so much so that a kind of mythology has built up around him. Such as stories about his work being sold before it even makes it on to the walls of the Taylor Galleries, where he exhibits regularly, because buyers are waiting on the pavement to intercept it as it arrives.
In fact, these stories are pretty close to the truth. It is generally hard to get hold of a John Shinnors, and harder still to get hold of the particular one you want - because often people want one kind of motif specifically, one of his scarecrows, or his cattle, or his kites. Which is partly why, in preparation for a major exhibition at the Limerick City Art Gallery, John Shinnors: Paintings and Drawings, which opens next Friday, he built up significant bodies of work, including a set of large-scale paintings and a series of works on paper, that he carefully withheld from prior exhibition - and from sale.
The man at the centre of what is, in art world terms, a considerable amount of public interest and attention, is in person remarkably unfazed and easy-going. He says he has always been easy-going, being blessed with a relaxed temperament, and, given his affable manner and relaxed, raffish demeanour, you can see that this is probably true. He lives and works in Limerick, where he was born and grew up.
He splits his time between two studios, one, for smaller work, adjacent to his house, the other on the high-ceilinged first floor of a fine old house on O'Connell Street. The latter is not only in the heart of the city, it is also just a few doors from where he was born, and a short walk from the house in which he grew up.
He doesn't move much further afield than the well-trodden route from studio to studio. Recently, in the course of an interview for a forthcoming publication on his work, he remarked that he had never been particularly inclined to go anywhere, and still isn't. Despite living within comfortable distance of some of the most spectacular coastline in the country, he was 18 years old before he even saw the sea.
He rarely travels to Dublin and has no great desire to venture abroad. Yet he is not complacent or incurious. Rather he finds more than enough subject matter within a tight radius of home and Limerick city. And he is no cultural tourist. He lets things sink in and percolate in his imagination for as long as they like, so that his paintings tend to come from long familiarity with the subject matter.
You could argue that his remarkable status derives from clever career management; that, with brilliant foresight, he set out to devise an instantly recognisable pictorial style, a corporate brand that could be cleverly marketed, with a reclusive, Garbo-esque persona to add a little mystique. Hence the fact that the Shinnors brand is one of the most artistically successful.
He does have a signature style and it is recognised and successful, but there was no career game-plan involved.
First, Shinnors is not a career game-plan kind of person. He is not ambitious in the conventional sense of the term. For most of his life he has been content to follow the inclination of the moment. He liked to draw, but cannot recall lifting a paintbrush until he was in his late teens. He didn't really have it in mind to become an artist.
After an abortive start at Limerick School of Art, he decamped to England with his guitar - this was the late 1960s - and drifted around, going through a variety of casual jobs.
When he returned to Ireland he completed his art-school stint, but was slow to come round to the idea of actually devoting himself to, and making a living from, art. Cannily, though, he knew he didn't want to go on to teach at art school, which would have been an obvious and diversionary career move.
Then there is that fact that, while his painting is recognisable, it has never been static. He never settled into a lucrative stylistic niche. In fact, looking over the span of his work from the late 1970s to the present day, the consistency and the rate of internal development is exceptional. This is apart altogether from the decisive shift from a style of heightened realism to the relatively abstracted, stylised approach with which he is now associated.
The basis of his painting has consistently been a strong feeling for pattern combined with an instinct for pinpointing the dramatic element that gives a composition a life of its own. You always get the feeling that there is something else going on in his paintings; they are never simply an arrangement of marks. This element of magic or mystery was quite overt in, say, the mid-1980s work. Not only was there likely to be a virtuoso piece of painting, involving dramatic chiaroscuro and a theatrical flourish, but often the imagery pointed directly to magic.
At this stage, Shinnors's artistic relationship to Jack Donovan, who had taught at Limerick School of Art when he was there, was quite clear. A maverick figure, Donovan succeeded in formulating a personal pictorial language that describes a consistent, self-contained world, dreamlike and surreal, and characterised by folly and desire. Although humour is certainly involved, it is a dark, mordant humour. Much of this applies equally, if in a different vein, to Shinnors.
Perhaps the magic of painting, for him, lay in the flourish with which he presented us with fragments of hyper-real reality, in what you could do with paint. Or what he could do, with brilliant lighting design and tight management of colour, with which he is famously sparing. He has grown more and more careful with and wary of colour, and fonder of black and white, or rather of the infinite variety of blacks and whites that he has come to know.
THROUGHOUT the 1990s he became increasingly bold in his use of pattern. Pictures are sometimes based on the incongruous but entirely reasonable juxtaposition of two favoured motifs, such as kite and roofs, cattle and road or gate. But the motifs are stylised to a degree that leads many to label the pictures as simply abstract. They are never abstract, and they are actually all the more legible because Shinnors is so consistent in the repertoire of motifs that he employs.
For example, the previously unseen work in the Limerick exhibition features two favourite strands of imagery. He has painted scarecrows for a long time, and the large paintings are dominated by the ominous, slightly threatening close-up view of mask-like scarecrow heads. There is a wealth of implication in these rather stark and, it must be said, on occasion humorous images.
The works on paper, meanwhile, relate to a stretch of country that has long held particular significance, bordering on fascination, for him. Periodically, he likes to make a journey that has become a form of pilgrimage. His route takes him from Limerick to Foynes on the Shannon estuary, across on the Tarbert ferry and on to Loop Head, a place at the edge of the world, reached through terrain that bears traces of the depopulation wrought by the Great Famine. The lighthouse at Loop Head is a recurring presence in his paintings. The flat, estuarine topography also features a great deal. The depth and range of these two series, and the clues they give to the nature of his pictorial concerns, should consolidate and broaden his already formidable reputation.
John Shinnors: Paintings and Drawings is at the Limerick City Gallery of Art, Pery Square, from next Thursday until November 10th. Telephone: 061-310633.